Bicycles are pervasive, inexpensive, reliable and are used everyday throughout most of the world. This invention relates to innovations in the bicycle saddle. While bicycle saddles have seen improvements over the last century, there remain some fundamental problems that have resisted prior art attempts to solve them.
The inventors see the prior art teaching two primary types of bicycle saddles, which will be referred to herein as a traditional saddle and a modern saddle. U.S. Pat. No. 823,916 (Brooks, Holt) teaches making the traditional saddle by suspending leather between a cantle and nose. U.S. Pat. No. 6,244,655 (Minkow et al.) teaches making the modern saddle with a plastic shell, padding, and a seat cover of leather or plastic. Both saddle types typically incorporate suspension rails for mounting the saddle to the bicycle via a seat post, as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 5,466,042 (Herman).
Traditional leather suspension saddles, as exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 823,916 (Brooks, Holt), tend to be particularly heavy due to the necessity of constructing them from thick leather and heavy metal assemblies. These tendencies have reduced their use as bicycles became increasingly lightweight.
Further, traditional leather saddles tend to wear out by stretching over time, resulting in the inclusion of bulky, heavy, tensioning screws in such saddle designs. The designs assume that the material used is ductile and has a memory, in other words that it is capable of maintaining a shape without support once formed into that shape, and that if flexed or bent within limits, the material will tend to return to that shape. Leather is a relatively inelastic material, which limits the extent to which the seating surface can yield under a rider's load and then return to its unloaded shape.
The leather acts as an additional layer of clothing, increasing the rider's perspiration and temperature which is undesirable in a physically demanding activity such as bicycling. Further, leather designs generally fail to provide adequate aeration to the rider, which is important as perspiration in the seat area results in chafing and discomfort to the rider.
Traditional leather saddles are primarily stretched longitudinally (along the front to rear axis), which limits the shapes that can be achieved, and to maintain saddle shape, a heavy grade of leather must be typically used. Innovation with modern materials has largely ceased due to the decline in popularity of leather saddles, with the result that the support carriages are frequently bulky, heavy, and inelegant. In addition, leather saddles frequently wear badly around their edges even with normal usage.
Modern saddles, as exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 6,149,230 (Bontrager), are typically made of a plastic shell, deformable padding layers, and a seat cover of leather or plastic.
Modern saddles often suffer at least from the fact that the deformable layers fail to optimally distribute the rider's weight over the largest possible area. Such deformable padding layers, which rely on varying the amounts and properties of the padding in specific areas of the saddle to maximize comfort, fail to accommodate the wide variety of different riding positions, as the padding placements are necessarily optimized for only one position. The result is that riders frequently feel extreme discomfort while riding, to the point that many quit the sport.
Reducing padding to reduce weight comes primarily at the expense of comfort. Modern saddles also act as an additional clothing layer, and fail to provide adequate ventilation for the rider. Modern saddles, particularly gel designs, may wear around their edges with normal use. Crashing tends to accelerate this wear.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,597,202 (Andersen) teaches a modern saddle as a slung fabric bicycle seat, where the seat is slung in the style of a hammock or director's chair, limiting the direction and amount of tension, if any, that can be applied to the fabric. U.S. Pat. No. 5,927,802 (Kesinger) teaches a modern saddle having a flat, inelastic suspended platform upon which padding is placed to provide cushioning. Neither these nor the previously cited patents teach stretching a membrane into a shape conducive to use as the primary seating surface of a bicycle saddle.
While partially addressed by modern saddles such as the design disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,244,655 (Minkow et al.), the issue of designing anatomically proportioned (“ergonomic”) saddles remains difficult. By virtue of their load support mechanisms, both leather and modern saddles are generally limited in their ability to optimally distribute the rider's weight. For example, leather, due to its inelasticity, tends to create “hot spots” under the rider's perineum and ischial tuberosities or ischium (“sitz bones”), resulting in, respectively, numbness in the crotch and soreness around the sitz bones. Various medical studies have indicated that this situation can lead to impotence in men. Other problems attributed to the compression of the perineum in men include nerve damage, cavernosal artery insufficiency, and site specific vaso-occlusion.
Modern ergonomic saddles reduce the perineal pressure by increasing the load on the sitz bones. However, due to the previously mentioned limitations, modern saddles do not tend to distribute loads well, and further discomfort in the sitz bone area typically results.
Both traditional and modern saddles also have in common a heavy appearance due to the opacity of the seating surface. As the bicycle industry is very concerned with aesthetics, this is a significant issue.
Due to the aforementioned shortcomings, saddles are among the most frequently replaced bicycle components.
There are a number of needs and desires, which have been mentioned above, and include the following: it is desirable for a bicycle saddle to be light-weight, a bicycle saddle should be aesthetically appealing and look light-weight, a bicycle saddle needs to be comfortable to ride, a bicycle saddle should be ergonomic, accommodating to the rider's specific anatomy and distributing body weight comfortably, a bicycle saddle should provide good aeration to the rider, a bicycle saddle should be inexpensive to manufacture, mechanically robust, and wear well.